- Arrivederci Roma (film)
Infobox Film
name = Seven Hills of Rome
image_size =
caption =
director =Roy Rowland
producer =Lester Welch
writer =Art Cohn andGiorgio Prosperi
narrator =
starring =Mario Lanza Marisa Allasio Renato Rascel
music =
cinematography =
editing =
distributor =Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
released = 1958
runtime = 107 min.
country =Italy andUSA
language = English
budget =
preceded_by = "Serenade (film) "
followed_by = "For the First Time "
website =
amg_id =
imdb_id = 0050140"Seven Hills of Rome" was tenor
Mario Lanza 's penultimate film. Shot in1957 on location inRome and at theTitanus studios in the Italian capital, the movie was released byMGM in January1958 .The
Technirama film tells the story of Marc Revere, an American TV singer of Italian heritage who travels toItaly in search of his jet-setting fiancée, Carol Ralston, played byPeggie Castle . Revere moves in with his comical and good hearted cousin Pepe Bonelli (Renato Rascel ), a struggling artist who also befriends a beautiful young girl, Raffaella Marini (Marisa Allasio ), whom Revere had met on a train. Like Lanza, this was Allasio's next-to-last film (the 17th of her career), as she would marry Count Pierfrancesco Calvi di Bergolo, grandson of H.R.M.Vittorio Emanuele III , King of Italy, in November 1958 and retire from the cinema.Among the selections that Lanza sings in this "vocal tour de force" ("Variety") is "
Arrivederci Roma ", performed in thePiazza Navona with a young street urchin. In typical Lanza fashion, the star had encountered the youngster while in Rome and insisted on her appearing in the film.Lanza also performs a sequence of imitations of famous singers of the era —
Perry Como ,Frankie Laine ,Dean Martin , andLouis Armstrong — committing to film what was one of his favorite party performances.Opera selections include "Questa o Quella" from "
Rigoletto ".The film was directed by
Roy Rowland and was the first of only four films produced byLester Welch . [imdb name|id=0919600|name=Lester Welch] The screenplay was the last written byArt Cohn , who died two months after the film's release in the same airplane crash that killed famed producerMike Todd , whose biography Cohn was writing at the time. Cohn partnered withGiorgio Prosperi [imdb name|id=0698782|name=Giorgio Prosperi] on the script for the Lanza film, which was based on a story byGiuseppe Amato ."Seven Hills of Rome" won a Laurel Award (1959) from "Motion Picture Exhibitor" magazine. [ [http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Awards/Laurel_Awards/1959 1959 Laurel Awards] ]
Its Italian title was "Arrivederci, Roma", which was to be the American title of a film Lanza was scheduled to make in 1960, until he died in Rome in October 1959.
ources
*Cesari, Armando. "Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy" (Fort Worth: Baskerville 2004).
*Notes accompanying the 1990 video release of the film.References
External links
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* [http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=109554 "New York Times" review]
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